The exhibition Bread and Roses formulates a question about the way artists define their status and position in the realm of an ever-widening economic gap: the possibility to reconcile dreams of social justice with the need of artistic freedom and autonomy. At the same time, the show highlights the tension between an artists’ rather ambivalent affiliation with the intellectual or financial elite and their responsibility for the rest of the society. For artists occupy a paradoxical position among social classes. Quoting Pierre Bourdieu, they form “the dominated part of the dominant class”; they can “flirt” both with the dominant elite and with the emancipation-oriented groups who feel oppressed.
This peculiar bipolar position adopted by artists provokes reflection on the way they highlight their affiliation, identification, or aspiration to a given social class, and the way they reveal their own privileged class position. We are interested in the process that transforms the existential and institutional figure of the artist into a medium that some use to demonstrate and modify their entanglement in the mechanisms of socio-economic divisions.
The exhibition shows the ways in which the tension that characterizes the current political and social conflicts in Poland becomes central to the art world and the figure of the artist. It is a tension between the symbolic and financial elites and those who are excluded from the so-called “establishment”—between those adjusted to capitalism and those who feel used and humiliated. The exhibition presents the nuance of this issue by placing it in a broader international context.
Artists: Jacek Adamas, Iván Argote, Art Workers Coalition, Brace Brace, Jesse Darling, Debora Delmar Corp., Deterritorial Support Group, Andrea Fraser, Nicolás Guagnini, Núria Güell, Rafał Jakubowicz, Christian Jankowski, Tobias Kaspar, Zofia Kulik, Gerard Kwiatkowski, Leigh Ledare, Zbigniew Libera, Michał Łagowski, Magdalena Malinowska, Adrián Melis, Metahaven, Marta Minujín, Teresa Murak, Daniela Ortiz, Zygmunt Piotrowski, Józef Robakowski, Daniel Rycharski, Georgia Sagri, Cindy Sherman, Santiago Sierra, Łukasz Surowiec, Christopher Kulendran Thomas, Gavin Turk, Andrew Norman Wilson and Renzo Martens presents: Cercle d’Art des Travailleurs des Plantations Congolaises
Bread and Roses
Museum of Modern Art, Warsaw
19 Feb – 1 May, 2016